Kaos Poster

This artwork was created as a present for a friend of mine and printed on an A2-sized poster. It's based on the main character, Kaos, from her webcomic. It's probably the most recent non-web-related artwork that I've completed.

War On Spam

Created in around 24 hours for .net magazine's 'Viral campaign' issue. It's a quick-draw competition between two players - a bit on the basic side, but all coded from scratch, with graphics, animation and voice work by yours truly.

This is all stuff I've created as personal projects. If you'd like to see what I do for my day job, head over to Massive Penguin - this is where I create websites, branding and illustrations for a range of clients.

Blogoriffic

Trusting The Little Yellow Bird

As I said in my first post, one of my main goals when making this site was to try out new things. I didn't want to stop at the design - I wanted to use something I hadn't tried before.

I actually started out my first design in the browser, using a basic Wordpress template and dummy database provided by my friend Sean Johnson. After deciding on a direction for the site I quickly discovered that Wordpress was total overkill for the project - I wanted to have something where I could create markup as lean as possible, and just drop in content where it was needed.

It's Really Simple
I had a design. I installed the Perch backend, and told it where I wanted the content to be displayed (and how it needed to come out of the database). I refreshed the page, and my editable content appeared in the admin panel. That's it. No loops to get your head around, no setting up new pages through the interface.

It's Really Quick To Set Up
Downloading, installing and setting up Perch took about 20 minutes. Dropping the content tags into my HTML page took another 10. Typing some initial content took about 15 minutes. So, in well under an hour I had a fully-functional website in a completely custom design - something I've not managed to do with Wordpress.

It's Really Extensible
There are a number of plugins available for Perch that make adding more complex bits to a page easy as dropping in a content tag, and setting a plain HTML template. Events listings, photo galleries and blogs are all possible, and no doubt more will be added soon - Perch is still young and it's constantly evolving, with improvements suggested by the community being incorporated into newer releases.

It's Really Well-Supported
The tech support from Drew at edgeofmyseat.com has been absolutely brilliant. The documentation can be a little hard to navigate at times, but when I posted problems that I couldn't solve on the support forum, Drew almost always replied within a few minutes (and since I did all my work on the site in the evenings, this was a really pleasant surprise).

I really like Perch (can you tell?). But there are a few things you need to be aware of:

It's Not Free
This will immediately put some people off; after all, you don't need to pay for Wordpress (or Drupal, or Joomla) and factoring in extra cost for a CMS into any project - particularly a personal one - starts reducing profit margins. What you need to ask yourself is: how much billable time will I lose hacking a free CMS into outputting the code I need, and cleaning up after clients who start adding pages where pages aren't meant to go?

It's Not a Magic Bullet
No CMS will completely remove the possibility of a client trying to do something they're not supposed to, or turn marketing jargon-laden copy into beautiful prose. What you can do is minimise the risk that the client can create 200 empty pages because they kept hitting the refresh button.

It's Not Right For Every Project
As with any CMS, you need to look at the pros and cons of using it for a given project. If you need all the features that Wordpress ships with, and the power it provides, then you're probably best off using Wordpress. If you want something really modular to power a portal site, you're best going with Drupal or Joomla. If you want something simple, and to keep tighter control over what your clients can do, I'd heartily recommend Perch.

About Me

As you may have guessed, my name is Mike. I live in sunny Peterborough with my awesome girlfriend, a couple of bunnyrabbits, a multitude of fishes, and two cats whose mission in life seems to be to drive me mad. I run a small design agency, Massive Penguin Limited, creating websites, branding and illustration for a range of clients.

This site is used mainly as a creative experiment, and to showcase the odd piece of work that I've done in my spare time.

I love to draw, and you can see some of my work on the Catalyst Studios website.

When I was younger I wanted to grow up to be (at various different times): a cartoonist, a train driver, Spiderman, and a Ninja Turtle. Web Designer seemed like a good compromise, in the end.

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Smoke Signal

Tried. Tested. Carcinogenic.

Pros:

Cheap

Warm

Cons:

Singed toes

Uncontrollable coughing

Carrier Pigeon

Your feathered friend.

Pros:

Taste (not unlike chicken)

Faster than Royal Mail

Cons:

Increasing grain prices

Poo (lots of)

(Anti)Social Butterfly

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